[voidpointer]

One doesn't become a leader by just being called the lead. Some people have personal traits that make them assume a leader role more often then others. In my experience, a team that is constantly looking for one person to call all the shots isn't very much empowered. If everyone can take responsibility to own up for the calls to make, you end up with a far more engaged team. It requires a certain maturity but a motivated team should be able to grow into such a mode over a couple of weeks or month. Experts will emerge on certain topics and the team will often look to them to weight in on certain topics. That will all come pretty naturally once a team has passed its initial formation phase.

[jerf]

"In the cases of a disagreement deadlock you need someone to break the deadlock." != "a team that is constantly looking for one person to call all the shots".

[zaphar]

A good tech lead actively works to minimize occasions to exercise his role as deadlock breaker. But you can't eliminate that need. If you do then the first time you have a deadlock will be a disaster and you may find that a well functioning team has now turned in a massively dysfunctional one.

[jerf]

"In the cases of a disagreement deadlock you need someone to break the deadlock." != "You can eliminate the need for disagreement deadlocking."

[crdoconnor]

"In the cases of a disagreement deadlock you need someone to break the deadlock."

97% of the time consensus driven decision making means no deadlock and the other 3% of the time you can put decisions to a vote.

I've seen more value destroyed by a team lead inappropriately setting the wrong agenda than I have by team members not knowing when to shut up.

If anything I've found that there's often too much consensus (people who just go with the flow rather than voicing an opinion).

[tetrep]

> 97% of the time consensus driven decision making means no deadlock and the other 3% of the time you can put decisions to a vote.

That's now how deadlocks work. You can't just vote your way out of them, if you could, you wouldn't be in a deadlock to begin with. You'd just be at the point where a decision needs to be made.

> If anything I've found that there's often too much consensus (people who just go with the flow rather than voicing an opinion).

That's a separate problem. A healthy and functional team needs to be able to trust one another's opinions and provide an environment where everyone feels comfortable speaking their minds. If you don't have those the value of intrateam communication is comically low.

[crdoconnor]

>That's now how deadlocks work. You can't just vote your way out of them, if you could, you wouldn't be in a deadlock to begin with. You'd just be at the point where a decision needs to be made.

I've seen a number of different scenarios:

1) Consensus after a short discussion (vast majority of cases).

2) Consensus after a drawn out discussion (occasional, usually the discussion is valuable even if it takes a while).

3) Consensus after a drawn out discussion with one or two holdouts who agree to go with the majority opinion under protest (not common).

4) A drawn out discussion where it becomes clear that further discussion is fruitless and a (close) vote makes the decision (very, very rare but it has happened).

I'd say that that most of the time the decisions made in one of these 4 scenarios are better than the decisions made unilaterally by a team lead.

Whatever you're referring to as 'deadlock' I'm not sure I've ever seen it - as a team lead or otherwise. What is it?